Freud and American Sociology E-Book

Philip Manning

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 364

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Although Freud’s impact on social science – and indeed 20th century social thought – has been extraordinary, his impact on American sociology has been left relatively unexplored. This ground-breaking book aims to fill this knowledge gap. By examining the work of pioneers such as G.H.Mead, Cooley, Parsons and Goffman, as well as a range of key contemporary thinkers, it provides an accurate history of the role Freud and psychoanalysis played in the development of American social theory. Despite the often reluctant, and frequently resistant, nature of this encounter, the book also draws attention to the abiding potential of fusing psychoanalytic and sociological thinking.

Freud and American Sociology represents an original and compelling contribution to scholarly debate. At the same time, the clarity with which Manning develops his comprehensive account means that the book is also highly suitable for adoption on a range of upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, including sociology, social theory, social psychology, and related disciiplines.

Leseprobe

FREUD AND AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY

FREUD AND AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY

PHILIP MANNING

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Copyright © Philip Manning 2005

The right of Philip Manning to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2005 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-6935-9

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1   An Uncertain Place: Freud in American Sociology

Introduction

The Intellectual Background

The Freudian Mirror

Freud’s 1909 Visit to the United States

Freud among American Sociologists

Freud’s Initial Reception in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review

Assessment

2   From Sumnerology to Cooley’s Social Self: Proto-Symbolic Interactionism

Introduction

From Sumnerology to the Second Sumner

Sumner’s Background

The First Sumner

The Second Sumner

The Manifest and Latent Second Sumner

Anti-Sumnerology and the Institutionalization of American Sociology

Three Strands of Cooley’s Sociology

Cooley’s Cultural Theory

Cooley as Proto-Symbolic Interactionist

Cooley’s Methodology

Proto-Symbolic Interactionism and Freud

3   Symbolic Interactionism and Psychoanalysis: Blumer’s and Goffman’s Extension of Mead

Introduction

Mead’s Social Behaviorism and Assessment of Psychoanalysis

Blumer’s Opposition to Freud and Parsons

Goffman’s Understanding of Mental Illness

The Implications for Goffman’s Sociology

The Interaction Order: Taxonomic Zoology

Tensions in Goffman’s Account of the Self

4   Parsons’ Freud: The Convergence with Symbolic Interactionism

Overview

Introduction

Parsons’ Action Theory

The Survival Test: AGIL

Integrating Freud into Sociological Theory

The Empirical Demonstration: The American University

5   Philip Rieff and the Moral Ambiguity of Freud

Introduction

Rieff’s Textual Laboratory

Rieff’s Sociology of Culture:A Culture Lost

Rieff’s Sociology of Culture:A Culture Gained

Rieff’s Sociology of Culture:A Culture Imagined

6   Sociologists as Analysts and Auto-Ethnographers: Hochschild, Chodorow, Prager, and After

Introduction

The Current Context

Hochschild, Chodorow, and Prager

The Analysis of Transference and Ms A.

Rethinking Transference

From Ethnographies of Concepts to Reflexive Ethnography

Concluding Thoughts

References

Index

Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt to my teachers, colleagues, and students. In particular, I would like to thank the wonderful group of sociologists at the University of Durham who set me on this path 20 years ago. Harriet Bradley, Dave Chaney, Bob Roshier, Irving Velody, and Robin Williams taught and inspired me at the same time. Charles Turner, now a professor at Warwick University, also taught me a lot and insisted on the seriousness of social theory. At Cambridge I was lucky to be taught by Anthony Giddens and Derek Gregory, and to have Chris Philo, Peter Rush, and Alison Young as intellectual companions.

When I began this project I knew relatively little about Freud and psychoanalysis. I was therefore in need of all the help I could get from the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute. Vera Camden, Scott Dowling, Javier Galvez, Murray Goldstone, and Sara Tucker all helped me read and understand Freud and psychoanalysis in an informed way. At Cleveland State University Bill Morgan was particularly important in helping me think through some of the ideas presented in this book. Jim Chriss also happily listened to my ideas and offered useful criticisms. Teresa LaGrange asked me every day for six months whether the book was finished and that needle was a remedy for my laziness.

Colleagues from nearby Chicago also helped. Fred Strodtbeck and Andy Abbott both spent several hours listening to my ideas and offering suggestions. Gary Fine has participated directly, as he and I co-authored several papers while I worked on this project. Gary alerted me to the importance of Philip Rieff’s work and invited me to present a paper on Rieff at the American Sociological Meetings in Chicago in 2002. There I met Charles Camic, Lauren Langman, Howard Kaye, Alan Woolfolk, and Jonathan Imber. I would like to thank them all for their help, particularly Jonathan Imber who answered many of my questions by phone and email long after the conference was over. I also benefited from my work as an editor of Symbolic Interaction. Over a two-year period I had countless exchanges with Kathy Charmaz and Dave Maines. Although this work was often tiring and frustrating, it was an excellent education, and Kathy and Dave gave me a powerful demonstration of intellectual commitment and fair-mindedness.

I presented parts of this book at seminars at Cleveland State University, the University of Durham, the University of Leicester, and the University of Salford. I would like to thank Robin Willams, Greg Smith, and Jack Barbalet for allowing me to speak at their respective universities and for ensuring a lively exchange of ideas. I would also like to thank Emma Longstaff of Polity Press and the anonymous reviewers of drafts of this manuscript.

Chapter 3 incorporates some material I have published elsewhere. See my papers “The Institutionalization and Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill: Lessons from Goffman,” in James Chriss (ed.), 1999, Counseling and Therapeutic State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter); “Ethnographic Coats and Tents,” in Goffman and Social Organization: Studies in a Sociological Legacy, edited by Gregory Smith, 1999 (London: Routledge); and “Credibility, Agency and the Interaction Order,” Symbolic Interaction, 2000, 23(3): 283–97. Chapter 5 draws heavily on my paper “Philip Rieff’s Moral Vision of Sociology: From Positive to Negative Communities – and Back?,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 2003, 3(3): 235–46.

Lastly, I would like to remember the friends and family who had little interest in this project but who kept me happy and motivated. These include my cycling friends Joanne Cohen, Chris and Rich Elliott, Lou Giesler, Jim and Susan Hughes, and Morris Wheeler. My extended family is now spread out across England and Greece. Thank you to my stepmother, Julia Manning, my brother John, and Olga, Harry, Irene, Venetia, and Orestes, with whom we spend our summers. To my wife, Maria Hatzoglou, and my sons, Simon and Triantaphilos: I love you all.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my wife’s parents, Triantaphilos and Venetia, who traveled to the United States to help raise our children but who have both died without seeing the real fruit of their labor, and to the memory of my father, Brian Manning. At all the turning points in my life I remember him by my side. The structural engineer in him would no doubt have found most of the ideas in this book to be dodgy, but he would nevertheless have ordered a copy for every public library he could get to.

Preface

This book attempts to show that qualitative sociology can benefit from ideas derived from a stripped-down, non-clinical version of psychoanalysis. I argue that the fusion of theoretical, methodological, substantive, and moral concerns that emerged under the banner “symbolic interactionism” reached its highpoint with Goffman’s powerful study, Asylums (1961). This study was the first “ethnography of a concept” (Manning, 1992) – in this case of the total institution – rather than an ethnography of a place at a certain time. In this book Iargue that once the extent of this achievement is realized, it is worthwhile extending this already rich qualitative tradition by incorporating the psychoanalytic understanding of transference and counter-transference into it. This will result in a blurring of genres: specifically the line between traditional ethnography and the newfangled “auto-ethnography” will be erased as new and old forms of data are intermingled. This book is therefore an exploration of the intellectual history of this proposed theoretical fusion.

Symbolic interactionists share some of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological concerns of psychoanalysts, especially those analysts with a “relational” approach. Although symbolic interactionists do not perform clinical work, their interest in symbols, meanings, and groups is reminiscent of psychoanalysis. George Herbert Mead’s famous discussion of the self as a reflexive entity with an “I” and a “me” bears more than a surface resemblance to Freud’s later structural model of the self as a composite of the id, ego, and super-ego. In fact, the similarity was noted by Mead himself and later pursued by Shibutani and others. There are also methodological similarities: both symbolic interactionists and psychoanalysts have employed a qualitative methodology that has been out of step with the statistical, quantitative, and experimental ambitions of their respective colleagues.

However, as I explore in chapter 1 of this book, what seems reasonable is not always perceived to be so by the parties involved. Although American sociologists were alerted to psychoanalysis by Freud himself during his visit to Clark University in 1909, his message fell on deaf – or at least unresponsive – ears. For the most part, pre-World War II American sociologists did not view psychoanalysis as a cognate discipline. Rather, they tended to see it as an inferior version of their own activities, spicier but less reliable.

As I show in chapters 2 and 3, the Meadian, post-social behaviorism, soon to be symbolic interactionism, that emerged at Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century, often defined itself, albeit elliptically, in opposition to Freud and psychoanalysis. Nowhere was this clearer than in the work of both Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman. In a sense, these two men mark the passing of the guard, as Blumer is a key link back to Mead and Goffman is the messenger from the future. They both agreed that psychoanalysis had no role to play in any kind of sociology.

As I suggested in the opening paragraph, in my view, Goffman’s Asylums (1961) marks a critical moment in the history of symbolic interactionism and American sociology in general. In part this is because it clearly signaled the transition to a post-Blumerian era, with Goffman as the new key figure. “The King is dead. Long live the King.” But, even more significantly, Asylums marks the culmination of the non-psychoanalytic, symbolic interactionist research program. In a brilliant fusion of theoretical, methodological and moral insights, Goffman produced a new kind of ethnographic study, no longer of a place at a certain time but of a concept. Goffman did not write an ethnography of St Elizabeth’s Hospital in the 1950s. Rather, he wrote an ethnography of the concept of the total institution. This was a tremendous advance over what had come before. Although it is certainly true that it was Everett Hughes who taught him to think in this way, it was Goffman’s singular achievement to realize the project in so spectacular a fashion. The introduction of comparative data generated both empirical and theoretical developments. Asylums also made it plain that sociology is a moral practice. Goffman felt an obligation to side with the underdog and resist the abuses of 1950s psychiatry. The moral lesson Goffman taught sociology is the same one Philip Rieff offered to psychoanalysts who mistakenly thought that their rightful home was in a medical school or biology department.

Goffman’s invention and demonstration of a new way of doing symbolic interactionist ethnography could have marked a transition to a new gold standard for qualitative research. However, for unclear reasons, this did not occur. As has been pointed out from time to time (for example, Fine and Manning, 2000: 457) there is not a “Goffman school.” This may be because Goffman is thought of as an energetic writer rather than as a methodologist. It is also true that Goffman did not try to build a school, in the way that Durkheim, Parsons, or Garfinkel did, perhaps because he believed that there was no work for what Peter Winch called “under-laborers.” However, I believe that the most important factor is that Goffman did not represent himself as a methodological innovator. He wrote very little that was explicitly and exclusively methodological – just a bootlegged talk (1989) and the introduction to Relations in Public (1971). This represents a gigantic failure of marketing. Instead he became one of the preeminent theorists of face-to-face interaction. This is true but it does not do justice to the range of his achievements.

However, there was an additional problem with Goffman’s comparative ethnography of concepts. This problem surfaced in many different and apparently unrelated criticisms of his work. Goffman was accused of analyzing social interaction but of ignoring the people who do the interacting. His books, Sennett elegantly said, had “scenes but no plots.” Some people found his analysis of St Elizabeth’s Hospital so abstract that they wondered whether he ever visited the place. Others made much the same point when they complained that Goffman did not present field notes in Asylums (in fact he did, but there are few).

Goffman thought of the ethnographer in contradictory ways. For the most part, he suggested that the ethnographer should be a fly on the wall who is easily missed and so can observe the social world without affecting it. However, Goffman also suggested that the ethnographer should feel able “to settle down [in the group being studied] and forget about being a sociologist” (1989: 129). His definition of participant observation emphasized this, as he described it as a technique requiring ethnographers to subject themselves and their bodies to the demands placed routinely on members of the groups being studied (1989: 125).

Even if Goffman followed his own advice, very little if any information about his own experiences appear in Asylums or elsewhere. Even the deeply personal essay that drew on his own experiences, “The Insanity of Place” (in Goffman, 1971), about the challenges of living with someone who is mentally ill, is written with misleading detachment. Goffman had certainly been subjected to the life he described.

This issue is the connecting door to psychoanalysis from sociology that I discuss in chapter 6. Stripped of nineteenth-century mechanistic metaphors and deterministic, developmental schemata, psychoanalysis is a relational theory in which transference and counter-transference are the central ideas, as Chodorow argued recently (1999). With no clinical responsibilities and no (traditional) clients to serve, sociologists have the opportunity to use their own counter-transferential reactions to the social and bodily experiences of group membership as valuable data for their disparate projects. I take this to be the line separating ethnography and auto-ethnography: the ethnographer is primarily an observer, whereas the auto-ethnographer shares in the experiences of the group as a group member. These experiences must therefore mean the same cluster of things to the auto-ethnographer as they do to group members. The auto-ethnographer should not write autobiography, which we read because of the uniqueness of the author’s experiences. By contrast, the auto-ethnographer, like sociologists in general, must strive to identify the typical. Goffman understood this as a methodological precept but he did not integrate it into his writing. As a result, his classificatory approach that is so reminiscent of Simmel is in many ways the culmination of the project initiated by William Sumner toward the end of his life that resulted in the publication of Folkways (1906). One of Sumner’s greatest admirers, Charles Cooley, was nevertheless able to recognize the importance of the sociologist’s own experiential data. His now forgotten Life and the Student (1927) contains the auto-ethnographic voice that is suppressed by the otherwise extraordinary Sumner-Goffman tradition.

There is of course a second, more dominant sociological tradition that has sought to integrate psychoanalytic insights into mainstream sociology. This is the grand sociological theory of Talcott Parsons that monopolized sociological thinking in the late 1940s and 1950s and that I discuss in chapter 4. In many ways, Parsons’ action theory is what every sociologist in principle wants: a single framework in which varied empirical projects can be integrated. Parsons’ background in biology allowed him to understand the incredible promise of breakthroughs in molecular biology and to want them for sociology. In Parsons’ view, psychoanalysis, particularly object relations, could play an important subsidiary role in action theory. Freud and Mead converged and made an important contribution. Freud in particular was promoted to the rank held by Durkheim and Weber. However, the key test for Parsons’ action theory, as it is for molecular biology and Goffman’s ethnography of concepts, is the empirical realization of the ideas. Molecular biologists have been able to generate a cascade of results. Goffman produced Asylums. Parsons, however, struggled and toward the end of his career made a final effort with Gerald Platt to show his ideas in action. Their study, The American University (1973), is an overlooked classic that was often insightful. However, as I discuss in chapter 4, as a demonstration of action theory it was a failure, albeit an instructive one.

Parsons’ failure was conceptual, in that his complicated scheme of interlinked two-by-two classificatory boxes could not capture the complexity of social life. However, Parsons also clung to the natural scientific assumption that his work was morally neutral. He read Freud in this way, unable to grasp, as Rieff did brilliantly, that Freud was a moral teacher (perhaps the moral teacher), albeit one in need of radicalization. Rieff is primarily remembered for his extraordinary study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), but I emphasize in chapter 5 that his later work may be more significant because it is there that his own cultural critiques were expressed most powerfully. Rieff was a model for a certain kind of rigorous teaching, but he was also a powerful theorist in his own right, despite his self-deprecating claim to have discovered nothing new.

In the final chapter of the book I attempt to thread together these disparate themes, highlighting work from Arlie Hochschild, Nancy Chodorow, Jeffrey Prager, and Loic Wacquant. The first three exemplify the version of psychoanalysis that can connect to the best of symbolic interactionism (which I identify as the breakthrough ethnographic work of Goffman). Wacquant is the wild card. He does not appear interested in fusing psychoanalysis and ethnography and is not interested at all in auto-ethnography. However, I believe that his study of the social world of boxing shows the contribution that is missing from Goffman. I understand this contribution to be the counter-transference that Chodorow and Prager identify as one of the keys to contemporary psychoanalytic practice.

I do not know whether my overall argument will carry the day. If it fails, I hope that I have at least rekindled interest in some extraordinary sociological works. I remember in particular picking up Sumner’s Folkways, Cooley’s Life and the Student, Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and Parsons and Platt’s The American University. In each case I began reading with a slight grimace, skeptical that the book could still speak to me. By contrast, Freud, Goffman, and to a lesser extent Parsons seem all too familiar. Part of the pleasure in working on this project was the revelation that all these voices are still relevant. At a minimum, I hope that I am able to persuade people to read or reread these and other treasures from sociology’s rich intellectual history.

1

An Uncertain Place: Freud in American Sociology

For we do not consider it desirable at all for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medicine and to find its last resting place in a textbook of psychiatry under the heading ‘methods of treatment’…. It deserves a better fate and, it may be hoped, will meet one. As a ‘depth psychology’, a theory of the mental unconscious, it can become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.… The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one.

Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, 1966, vol. 20: 248

Had Freud lived long enough to enter more deeply into the technical analysis of the object-systems to which the individual becomes related, he would inevitably have had to become, in part, a sociologist, for the structure of these object-systems is – not merely influenced by – the structure of society itself. Essentially, Freud’s theory of object-relations is a theory of the relation of the individual personality to the social system. It is the primary meeting ground of the two disciplines of psychology and sociology.

Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality, 1964: 107

Introduction

This book is an investigation of some of the responses made by American sociologists, most of whom are associated with symbolic interactionism, to Freud and psychoanalysis. The premise of this project is that (1) elements of psychoanalysis can strengthen symbolic interactionism; (2) these elements were anticipated in some form by the founding figures of symbolic interactionism; and (3) there are non-clinical but empirical ways of pursuing symbolic interactionism “after Freud.” This project therefore offers, in Foucault’s suggestive phrase, a “history of the present” of one strand of the development of American sociology. Like other aspects of the emergence of American sociology, it is a complicated story relating how once famous but now largely forgotten figures argued about the value of psychoanalysis and its relevance to the social sciences.

From the first published responses to Freud by American sociologists there was disagreement, if not outright controversy, about the importance of psychoanalysis. For some, Freud was a potential ally, someone who had demonstrated that apparently medical conditions were in fact better understood as variations of normal behavior. However, for others, Freud was an imperialist who threatened to undermine sociology’s autonomy. Both these views are, in a sense, predictable responses. What is more surprising is that another group of American sociologists found Freud’s arguments to resonate with ones with which they were already familiar. Contrary to what we might expect, Freud was not understood by them as a revolutionary thinker, but rather as one among many contributors to an analysis of the “social self” that was already well under way. It is this last viewpoint that guides much of the discussion in this book. My intention is to show that the reception given to psychoanalysis by American sociologists reveals the strength they perceived in their own homegrown sociology. The task of this book is therefore to assess whether their perception was well founded.

The most prominent attempt to integrate psychoanalysis into American sociological thinking was undertaken by Talcott Parsons, who captained this group initiative in the mid-1940s and after, beginning at a time when his influence was at its zenith. However, even then the proposed integration brought out what he and other American sociologists perceived to be the inherently sociological character of psychoanalysis at its best. Even Parsons’ own formal training in psychoanalysis did not convert him. Despite the fact that psychoanalysis was from 1909 until the 1960s an increasing part of the intellectual context of American sociology, Parsons, and American sociologists generally, largely retained their confidence in their distinctive approach to the study of human behavior and social interaction.

I think that it is helpful to anticipate the arguments that will be presented in this book. I will argue that the first distinctively American contribution to sociology was symbolic interactionism. This “somewhat barbaric neologism” was first coined in 1937 by Herbert Blumer and defined by him in two different, but interconnected, ways. The first definition stressed that the term is a “label” for the “great” similarities between a group of American scholars clustered in the Chicago area whose work shows affinities with the ideas of Blumer’s mentor, George Herbert Mead (1969: 1). The second definition was more formulaic. Blumer stated that symbolic interactionism is based on three premises: (1) that we act according to the meanings objects have for us; (2) these meanings emerge in social interaction; and (3) meanings are modified over time (1969: 2). For critics, this language qualifies everyone and no one as a symbolic interactionist; however, in the context of his first definition, Blumer’s approach has real teeth. This is because symbolic interactionism was not just a general set of assumptions about the social world; it was also a way of studying the social world, of doing sociology. It fused theoretical and qualitative methodological concerns, allowing both innovative theoretical extensions to Mead’s framework and methodological extensions to the pioneering empirical work of W. I. Thomas and others.

I consider one endpoint of this line of inquiry to be the incredible study by Erving Goffman, Asylums (1961a). This book extended both the theory and method of symbolic interactionism by being both an ethnography of St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, and a comparative ethnography of the concept of the total institution (Manning, 1992). Further, Goffman was not just an observer; he was also a moral critic. Later, Goffman ridiculed sociologists who thought of their discipline as a kind of chemistry, likening them to children playing with Gilbert sets (1971: xviii). In my way of thinking, Goffman was therefore traveling down the same road as his colleague-to-be, Philip Rieff, who also understood sociology as a moral discipline whose role was to preserve both a social and sacred order. Both Goffman and Rieff also emerged at a time when Freud’s star was at its zenith, and unsurprisingly both wrote against the backdrop of psychoanalysis.

In my retelling of this story, Goffman’s genius was to see a vital connection between the comparative, classificatory, conceptually innovative work of an earlier outcast, William Sumner, and the ethnographic approach of one of his former teachers, Everett Hughes. Goffman therefore separated himself from the more introspective tradition associated with Cooley. Cooley’s most psychoanalytic book, Life and the Student (1927), has been overlooked and lost to the canon. Ironically, both the classificatory, observational approach of Sumner and the introspective approach of Cooley can be found in Mead’s seminal statements in Mind, Self and Society (1962 [1934]) and, arguably, it is the “plasticity” or malleability of Mead’s ideas which has allowed them to have an enduring appeal.

In separating himself from this introspective tradition, Goffman also severed all ties with a psychoanalytic view of the social world. Although he had a deep knowledge of both Freud’s work and psychoanalysis in general, he was not conciliatory at all: he considered the psychoanalytic perspective to be speculative and the work of psychoanalytically minded psychiatrists to be ineffective at best. The thread that ties Cooley to Freud (that was brilliantly analyzed by Rieff) was therefore of no interest to Goffman. As a result, Goffman accepted that the internal worlds of the people who populate the “interaction order” could not be studied sociologically. In Jonathan Glover’s telling phrase, Goffman’s sociology treated people as having no “inner story” (1988: 175). Goffman’s antipathy to psychoanalysis left him no choice. Nevertheless, Goffman’s achievements were extraordinary, one of which was to fuse the theories of Sumner and Hughes and demonstrate the empirical power of the union.

Goffman needed but couldn’t find a version of psychoanalysis that had an elective affinity with the qualitative, loosely symbolic interactionist, Sumner/Hughes work that he had mastered. Surprisingly, Talcott Parsons, hardly the sociologist associated with symbolic interactionism, found the key to unlock the door to psychoanalysis for sociology. However, Parsons’ curse was his inability to walk through it. The key was Parsons’ realization that sociology needed a stripped-down version of psychoanalysis. Parsons realized that an “object-relations” approach in psychoanalysis could jettison mechanistic and deterministic aspects of some other versions of psychoanalysis. Further, sociologists as sociologists had no stake in debates about the clinical efficacy or scientific standing of psychoanalysis. After all, sociologists who obtain a license to practice psychoanalysis and then do so are no longer acting as sociologists.

This led Parsons to treat Freud as heading down the road of convergence that took him to Parsons’ own unified action theory. By de-emphasizing Freud’s developmental schemata and assumption of sexual etiology, Parsons’ Freud became, as Parsons himself recognized, a version of Cooley and Mead. This realization, as Jonathan Turner (1974) suggested in a seminal paper, brought both Freud and Parsons into the purview of symbolic interactionism. Blumer (1975), of course, was both angered and genuinely mystified by the suggestion that both his (former) nemeses were now his bedfellows.

The key that Goffman didn’t find was therefore the realization that sociology could get what it needed from psychoanalysis without accepting the baggage of mechanistic and/or deterministic schemata. This left sociologists free to use the powerful psychoanalytic ideas concerning transference, counter-transference, projection and introjection, and the ambivalence that accompanies the construction of internal worlds. This was the path back to the inner stories that Glover had correctly seen as missing from Goffman’s work. Parsons, unfortunately, could open but not walk through the door, in part because he was, by his own admission, an “incurable theorist” and in part because he retained ambitions for an amoral, scientific sociology. As a result, he could not produce the empirical study that would accomplish for him what Asylums accomplished for Goffman. In the last decade of his life, Parsons made one last effort, producing a fascinating but poorly received study, The American University, co-authored by Gerald Platt (1973). Despite many appealing qualities, the book failed to incorporate psychoanalysis meaningfully and produced instead an increasingly confusing array of two-by-two boxes that incorporated themselves in an infinite regress. Parsons needed to revert back to the ethnographic work he had tried in the early 1940s when he studied Boston hospitals. But in truth, as he recognized himself, his talents lay elsewhere. Further, Parsons could not accept that sociology is inevitably a form of moral critique. This is one of the lessons that we are taught by Philip Rieff. Parsons preferred to hold onto the idea he obtained (independently) from Durkheim and Henderson; namely, that sociology has much in common with biology. The flukish coincidence that his own AGIL schema bore a surface resemblance to Crick and Watson’s four building blocks of DNA (the AGCT “schema”), and hence to the birth of molecular biology, simply led Parsons further astray.

In the 25 years since Parsons died, sociologists such as Nancy Chodorow and Jeffrey Prager have trained as psychoanalysts and continued the project of paring down psychoanalysis to its key elements. Although they both recognize that this project is compatible with sociology, they have both developed clinical careers, and their insights have been largely clinically oriented. The logic of the position they develop demonstrates that the transference and counter-transference seen routinely in clinical settings is in fact endemic to all social relationships. As a result, the counter-transference experienced by the ethnographer or symbolic interactionist can be a viable, empirical, non-clinical guide to the internal world – or inner story – of the people who populate Goffman’s interaction order.

To date, neither Chodorow nor Prager has produced a psychoanalytic, reflexive anthropology or sociology, but they both recognize that this project, though difficult, is possible. Symbolic interactionists identify this work as “auto-ethnography,” a phrase coined by David Hayano (1982) to describe his own investigation of the social world of poker players. With no sense of his research as a psychoanalytic project, and lacking the confidence that he was doing anything more than playing poker and pretending that it was research, Hayano stepped back from the radical implication that his own counter-transference to the world of poker was the most interesting thing that he had to say about that world. Very recently, Loic Wacquant (2004), who shows none of Hayano’s inhibitions, has investigated the world of boxing, drawing heavily on his own counter-transference to the sport. Nevertheless, like Hayano, Wacquant does not conceive of his project as an extension of the thread that runs from Cooley to Freud, to Rieff, to Prager, and beyond.

It is critical to recognize that the endpoint of my own studies is not a stark choice between the Sumner-Hughes-Goffman tradition and the Cooley-Freud-Rieff tradition. The critical task, as I see it, is to recognize, as Mead and Parsons did but could not demonstrate empirically, that the comparative ethnography of concepts that Goffman developed is in fact compatible with the counter-transferential work of contemporary auto-ethnographers. This new fusion promises exciting yields. The problem is that it will take someone of the caliber of Goffman to produce it, not just someone of the caliber of Parsons to recognize it.

The Intellectual Background

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, American sociologists had to clarify where they stood in relation to other, already established, cognate sciences. The space they chose to occupy in part covered the territory of social psychology, along with ecology and social organization. Therefore, insofar as psychoanalysis was understood as a kind of social psychology, sociologists were at least initially receptive to Freudian ideas. In the two decades following Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909, sociologists responded to Freud in different ways, ranging from a hostile dismissal to a receptive embrace. What is striking during this time is that Freudian ideas were not considered to be particularly revolutionary (by admirers and critics alike), and as a result they could be readily assimilated into sociological thinking and presented as a coherent, established theory. Thus, psychoanalysis was presented as a version of preexisting American sociological social psychology. Freud was understood therefore for the most part – and at best – as a contributor to and not the founder of an intellectual approach.

It is also important to recognize that the American reception of Freud was complicated by – and was also subservient to – political, moral and methodological debates in Chicago and elsewhere about the appropriate form for sociology to take. These debates concerned three issues. The first was the extent to which sociology could, even in principle, justify political matters. This is hardly surprising, given that American sociology emerged following the Civil War and at a time of tremendous political and economic turmoil. Sociologists themselves had divided loyalties: some advocated socialist, some Progressive and some free-market principles. In some cases, sociologists changed their minds or just dithered, as in the case of Albion Small, who flirted with socialism for many years (Smith, 1988: 76). Second, sociologists debated whether their discipline could be a non-religious moral science of society, as many of its early proponents wanted it to be. Notably at the University of Chicago, but elsewhere also, sociology emerged as a discipline with a distinctive agenda. It was, in Abbot’s (1999) telling description, part academic discipline, part outreach effort. The third concern was more focused and technical: it was a debate about the specific role of positivism, quantification, and the role of qualitative research in sociological investigations.

The initial reception of psychoanalytic ideas in the first half of the twentieth century has to be understood against this intellectual background. For example: initially, sociologists who favored an engagement with psychoanalysis could not identify a way of collecting psychoanalytic data. That is, they could not answer the question of what a non-clinical version of psychoanalysis would look like. The developing life-history research at Chicago, associated initially with W. I. Thomas in sociology and William Healy in psychiatry, offered an answer to this question, and in the 1930s John Dollard formalized this, first by demonstrating the role psychoanalysis could play in a case study and then by establishing methodological guidelines. Louis Wirth (1931) offered a separate but commensurable argument when he advocated a “clinical sociology.”

It is interesting to note that, until the 1930s, American sociologists for the most part presented Freudian ideas as established theory, even though Freud himself continued to be productive – and to publish – until his death in 1939. In the 1930s, émigré psychoanalysts and American converts to psychoanalysis – notably Karen Horney, Eric Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan – began to advocate revisions to Freud that both sparked controversy and demonstrated that Freud’s work could be interpreted in different ways and with different points of emphasis. At this time, Herbert Blumer, himself an ardent critic of psychoanalysis, attempted to demonstrate that a powerful union of social psychological ideas, sociological research methods, and substantive interests emanating largely from Chicago could be coherently packaged together into the field of “symbolic interactionism.” Blumer understood that psychoanalysis was a potential imperialist force that must be resisted, and, in any case, Blumer had his own imperialist ambitions for his symbolic interactionist synthesis. Without particular knowledge of psychoanalysis, Blumer promoted efforts within soci-ology to resist any movement toward Freud. Blumer’s quasi-successor, Erving Goffman, was extremely knowledgeable about psychoanalysis (unlike Blumer), but he too viewed it as an inferior approach to the homespun symbolic interactionism that covered the same ground as psychoanalysis, but in a more convincing way, both theoretically and methodologically.

In the 1940s, the waters were muddied by Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who was most committed to the integration of sociological and psychoanalytic ideas. In fact, Parsons believed that this integration had to be recognized rather than constructed, because from his vantage point Freud’s ideas already “converged” with those of leading sociologists. Unlike the majority of American sociologists before him, Parsons believed that the way forward for the discipline was to draw upon European intellectual ideas. His initial emphasis was on the works of Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Marshall. Later, he emphasized Freud’s foundational role in sociological theory. It is striking that Parsons did not initially look to the American sociologists favored by Blumer, but instead imported European elements of sociological theory that were largely unknown and not translated.

Extending the arguments of the cultural revisionists, Parsons pursued a reading of Freud that was quite different from both conventional psychoanalytic and sociological interpretations. The purpose of this reading was initially to make Freud fit into a general theory of the social sciences, and to this extent Parsons emphasized the importance of the internalization of norms in both Freud’s account of the super-ego and in his own account of the “personality system.” Later, Parsons realized that his version of Freud made Freud readily compatible with the symbolic interactionist alternative to Freud that Blumer had promoted. When Jonathan Turner (1974) pointed this out publicly, Parsons acknowledged the similarity. By contrast, Blumer (1975) steadfastly rejected any invasion onto symbolic interactionist territory.

At about the same time, Philip Rieff initiated a project in which he analyzed the moral implications of Freud’s thought. His study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist was published in 1959. In this book he demonstrated the richness and nuances of Freud’s writings while distancing himself from Parsons, who had ambitions for a unified, general theory. By also ignoring the question of the clinical efficacy of psychoanalysis, Rieff sidestepped many of the debates that began in the 1950s and continue to the present day. Instead he reinstated a question that was very important to the first generation of American sociologists; namely, is it possible to have a moral science of society? Rieff’s continuing investigation of this question has resulted in a compelling and as yet unfinished sociology of culture that seeks to explore the bases of both social and sacred order.

The Freudian Mirror

Many of the arguments that follow are guided by a metaphor: that Freud’s work can be understood as a mirror which was used by American sociologists to get a better image of themselves. In looking at Freud they caught glimpses of themselves and, in a rather narcissistic way, often discovered that they liked what they saw.

The metaphor of the mirror is of course very familiar. It has also played a role in the development of both American sociology and post-Freud psychoanalysis, the former through Charles Horton Cooley, the latter through Jacques Lacan. Cooley’s lucid prose outlined a three-part process involving the realization that we appear to others in a certain way, a judgment concerning that appearance, and then an assessment that produces a “self-feeling” such as “pride or mortification” (1964 [1902]: 184). Unfortunately, Cooley’s looking glass doesn’t quite work in the same way that I think the Freudian mirror works. In the latter case, American sociologists looked at something that was “foreign,” judged it to be either lacking or a lesser version of themselves, and then felt self-satisfaction. Thus, in my telling of the mirror metaphor, American sociologists made a favorable comparison, whereas, in Cooley’s, the person makes a re-evaluation.

Lacan presents us with a rather different story from Cooley’s, although, as Wiley (2003) has recently shown, there are interesting connections between them. Lacan’s mirror stage, like his prose, is much more destabilizing than Cooley’s. For Lacan, the mirror stage is a “minimal paraphrase of the nascent ego”and, in Bowie’s retelling of the tale, what stands in front of the mirror is “something derisory.” In its first telling, Lacan had distinguished between a monkey’s and a child’s reaction to a mirror, arguing that the monkey actually understood things better than the child. This is because the monkey “is able to recognize that the mirror-image is an epistemological void, and to turn his attention elsewhere, [whereas] the child has a perverse will to remain deluded” (Bowie, 1991: 22–3). Anthony Elliott’s recent description of Lacan’s mirror stage turns out to be very useful for the argument I want to pursue:

According to Lacan, a profound sense of jubilation arises when the small infant sees itself in a reflecting surface. He [Lacan] argues that the mirror provides an image of corporeal wholeness, of oneness and unity. This sense of wholeness or unity is what Freud was trying to get at when he explored the concept of narcissism in his theoretical papers, and Lacan allows us to grasp the importance of the visual or optic genesis of narcissism as a condition of the self. The problem is, however, that the unity reflected in the mirror is not at all what it appears. (2001: 53–4)

Lacan’s mirror stage, as I understand it, is actually a good description of the process I’m trying to describe. Put indulgently, the “child” is the newborn of the American university: the discipline of sociology, which sees itself in the mirror and is “jubilant” in a narcissistic way. Further, sociologists imagine their discipline to have a wholeness and unity that in reality it does not possess. It also easily imagines itself growing up into adulthood and maturity, all the while remaining true to the likeness it sees now in the mirror. However, it’s all a lie and the child is in jeopardy.

In fact, I think the American sociologists’ mirror view of themselves involved a double lie. The first lie is the one revealed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely, that the reflected image had a discrete coherence, whereas in fact it did not – and does not now. Rather, as Abbot (2001) has shown, by the mid-1920s American sociology was already fragmented and arguably irreparably ruptured by substantive, methodological, disciplinary, and even political debates that, at best, suggest the image reflected back in the mirror was actually of many children, some of whom were bastards – certainly they were not all of one family. The second lie is that American sociologists falsely attributed to both Freud and psychoanalysis what they falsely attributed to themselves, namely, a singular unity. In a strange way, for very unclear reasons, the overwhelming majority of American sociologists from Robert Park onwards interpreted Freud as having a coherent, singular theory. They then often compounded the error by assuming that psychoanalysts themselves were mirror images of the original Freudian mirror, which they clearly were not. That is, American sociologists writing before 1930 could not detect any significant divisions in Freud’s own writings. Put dramatically, they seem to have assumed that his followers were all paid-up members of the Wednesday Night Club (Gay, 1988: 173–9) and hence born-again keepers of the faith.